“But if you take Adam Yao away from me, I’ll drive over there personally and punch you in the nose.”
Gerry laughed. “He’s that good, huh?”
“He’s one of Jay’s superstars. He’s done things I can’t talk about, not even to you.”
Gerry knew Yao had been involved with operations in Hong Kong and in North Korea, but he didn’t say anything about them. Instead, he said, “You keep Mr. Yao. Sounds like he’s already in a position that is getting the best out of him. Plus, I’m not looking to get a punch in the nose. I’ve had a rough week.”
“Really? What happened?”
“I helped out on an exercise with the assets. Opposition force, they call it. It didn’t go so well for anyone involved.”
“You aren’t hurt, are you?”
“Nothing that can’t be rectified by regular bandage changes and a steady supply of small-batch bourbon from my home state of Kentucky. I was shot eight times with simulated bullets that weren’t as simulated as I would have liked them to be. The President’s boy did the deed, in fact.”
“My God. I guess if they are drafting you to play OPFOR, they really are short of manpower over there.”
“I thought that would help you see the problem at hand.”
Mary Pat said, “I can’t let you have Adam, but I’ll find ten other suitable recruits for you if you want me to do that. I’m a little busy right now, but as soon as—”
Gerry said, “Don’t worry about it. We have two other good candidates we’re looking at, and they don’t work in the IC at the moment. Let me see how they develop. If I need more names, I’ll circle back to you.”
“Okay,” Mary Pat replied. “But as I said, something is brewing out there, so you can expect me to reach out sooner rather than later.”
“And we’ll always be ready to do our best.”
12
The wild-eyed young man sprinted across the flat ground, his chest heaving from the exertion of the run, the fear, and the weight of the rifle in his hands — and then he jolted back with a slap of metal on bone and whirled dead onto the dirt.
Four meters from the tumbling corpse, Xozan Barzani kept going, racing headlong into danger, over brown hardscrabble land, through the supersonic snaps of close-passing gunfire. Men dropped to his left and to his right, while he and others like him continued on to their target. Two hundred meters ahead of him a ceramics factory served as an enemy stronghold. His orders were to take it; his orders were foolish, and it appeared he’d soon pay the price of obeying them, just like the dead man on his left, and the others falling all around.
In Kurdish, the word peshmerga means “one who faces death.” Barzani was a Peshmerga captain, the leader of a company of troops that had numbered 120 three days earlier, but now was down to sixty-six men still able to hold a rifle and press a trigger. His company’s heavy machine gunners were dead, their weapons captured by the enemy, and his single recoilless rifle had run out of ammunition in the first hours of the battle.
He and his men had no cover other than a few rills in the dirt, some low earthen berms at various angles — none of which were very helpful in concealing them from the enemy — and a couple burned-out hulks of fighting vehicles. The only real cover was the ceramics factory, and it was now 185 meters away and in the hands of well-entrenched Islamic State fighters.
As a young boy Xozan had learned to distinguish the difference between incoming and outgoing rounds, and it sounded to him now like the enemy had vastly superior numbers of guns and seemingly limitless ammo.
He estimated the enemy’s remaining strength at well over one hundred fighters, all with cover and concealment, and helped out by heavy weapons and vehicles. He’d seen two Russian-built BRDM-2 armored scout vehicles with coaxial machine guns, and at least four technicals, pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Things had been going well for the Peshmerga for the past few months, strategically speaking, but as is often the case in war, the situation on the ground appeared a lot more dire than when looking at the map. While the Kurds, along with help from NATO airpower, had been advancing on multiple fronts toward the ISIS-held city of Mosul, the Islamic State had conducted a surprise counterattack east up the road toward Kalak, with their eyes on a strategically important bridge there.
Barzani’s battalion, just off the front lines of the fighting to the northwest, was rushed into the line of advance.
The Kalak bridge was secured by the Peshmerga, and all was good, till someone far above Barzani decided to press the initiative and commit his battalion to an advance. This might have looked good on paper, but Barzani’s company as well as the three others in the battalion were exhausted and woefully short on supplies. With not enough vehicles and heavy weapons, the battalion was ordered to the west, into ISIS-held lands, with orders to take Karemlash.
Now, two days later, Barzani figured his dead body would be found as close to Karemlash as he would ever get, and he was still kilometers away.
As soon as the Peshmerga attack began, armored civilian trucks loaded with improvised explosive devices had rumbled up the Mosul highway from Islamic State — held territory, and detonated in or near the Peshmerga lines, and slowing this slaughter had cost Barzani’s forces all their remaining RPGs, most of which had been ineffective against these suicide tanks.
After that it was close-in fighting on the open ground. ISIS finally pulled back to the ceramics factory, but Barzani’s company had no indirect-fire weapons to dislodge them, and the order to take the factory with AK-47s and boot leather was absolute madness.
Barzani stumbled over a low berm now, and found himself in the middle of an ISIS forward scouting position. Two black-clad men seemed as surprised to see the Kurd as he was to see them. He fired his wire-stocked AK-47 from his hip, dropped a bearded man at a distance of five meters, and when one of Barzani’s sergeants shot the other man through the jaw, they both softly chanted “Allahu Akbar,” their words indecipherable because of their heavy breathing.
Just then the dirt and stone around them kicked up, bits of rock pelted the captain in the face and hands, as a heavy machine gun, probably on the roof of the ceramics factory, opened up on his position.
Barzani dove headfirst into the foxhole with the bodies for cover, then he looked around for his sergeant. The man was dead three meters from the hole, his head missing.
Barzani had told himself he would keep running all the way to the factory, but despite this, his training took over, and he remained there under cover as the machine gun tilled the ground inches from his head.
Three men lay dead nearby, but looking down the pocked desert landscape, he saw a few dozen of his men still in the fight. They had all found their own little holes to crawl into. It filled him with pride that he would die today with such brave warriors, but he could not stop thinking about Kalak, the Kurdish town ten kilometers behind him, and the Kurdish civilians there. Women. Children. The aged. The wounded.
He’d never take the factory, and when Barzani and his men were all dead, ISIS would have no one to stop them from heading right into Kalak, driving straight up the main street and taking whatever they wanted, including the lives of every last living thing.
Just then, the machine-gun fire stopped, and he could hear the rumble of heavy equipment. He peered over the edge of the foxhole; saw both of the BRDM-2s rumbling out of the ceramics factory, fifty meters apart, and heading in his direction.
The scout cars were armored with up to fourteen millimeters of steel; the Peshmerga Kalashnikovs would do nothing more than annoy the occupants of the cars with the sound of bullets pinging off the hulls.